It's Gonna Be a Great Day: National Museum in Stockholm

Last Wednesday the art history class took our first field trip to Stockholm to visit the National Museum there. This was my first time in the city, and it was horribly gray and rainy--one of the first days of less than amazing weather I've had here! So I won't say much about Stockholm itself; i'll save that for a fuller visit!

The National Museum is located right in the center of Stockholm, near parliament and the royal palace (still occupied--the Swedes still have a royal family). It was first founded when King Gustav III donated his royal art collection to a new museum in 1792, and its current building opened in 1866 after twenty years of construction. They've recently done a major renovation and an entirely new hang, which made this visit very interesting. Some of the big changes include a change from a chronological hang to a thematic hang, so that each room has a overarching theme relating to the formation of Sweden as a nation. There is an emphasis on Swedish painters, but they are interspersed with other works, particularly 19th c French painters that played a role in the developed of Swedish modernism (Manet, Renoir, all the old boys, etc. A whole lot of good Rembrandts, too)

Anders Zorn, Midsommardans, 1897

The walls in each room are also very brightly painted. In Philadelphia, the Baroque room was recently repainted a bright, jewel tone blue that draws new details from the ornate and theatrical paintings hung against that color. Here, the rooms are much larger, so the brightly colored walls don't always correspond so carefully to the paintings hung on them. Still, it was refreshing. Some of the history paintings, most famously, the Coronation of Gustav III by Carl Gustaf Pilo (1782-1793) were hung very high on the walls as they would have been in contemporary salons. The new hang also brings in decorative arts and ceramics, so the paintings are contextualized with furniture and dinnerware (and even sometimes placed in conversation with contemporary art.)

Several important Swedish history paintings:

Carl Larsson, Midvinterblot, 1915 (some nice Medieval fake news)

Carl Gustaf Pilo, The Coronation of Gustav III, 1782-1793

Gustav Cederström, Bringing Home the body of Charles XII, 1884.

One thing I particularly noticed and liked in the National Museum was the heavy inclusion of women artists beginning with the 19th century. Sweden has argued that women were more easily welcomed into the art world here than elsewhere, and their curation certainly seems to support that. I've never seen so many paintings by women on museum walls, and particularly paintings of women actually painting. The famous male Swedish artists were juxtaposed with women who painted similar themes. Several women artists who I discovered were Eva Bonnier, Hanna Pauli, Fanny Brate, and Elsa Beskow (am especially obsessed with her nursery rhyme illustrations).